


Jellyfish

by ckret2



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Mad Science, Mad Scientists, Minor Character Death, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-22 22:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23334919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: She liked working with yarn. She liked the way it curled and coiled around her fingertips. She liked the way it turned from one dimensional to two just by entangling it with itself. But today the yarn looked limp and lifeless next to the new artificial limbs manipulating it.Three dozen of her students watched with rapt fascination. Two tentacles bounced a ball of yarn back and forth, while two more deftly knitted it into a scarf. When the prototype arm augmentations completed a six inch by six inch square, she beamed at her students: "Test one, manual dexterity and independent motion: passed."The students cheered.###"They'remine, they'remyarms! I won't give them up!" Olivia snarled at the grad student. Without thinking, she struck across the desk. Her right hand curled around the arm augmentations, fingertips feeling for the controls as he tried to jerk back.The arms powered up, and reacted to their master's commands.Test two, strength and crushing power: passed.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 42





	Jellyfish

**Author's Note:**

> Written originally for the [Women of Marvel zine](https://marvelwomenzine.tumblr.com/post/612790396483944448/hey-everyone-unfortunately-physical-leftovers). We were actually freed to post these a lot earlier lol.
> 
> I'm absolutely _fascinated_ by the fact that in Spider-Verse Doc Ock participates in educational videos that are used in high school, like she's some kind of villainous Bill Nye. The idea of someone so deeply selfish—willing to exploit/harm people with reckless abandon in pursuit of ever more fascinating discoveries—simultaneously being invested in STEM education outreach to kids—generally a very selfless activity. So I wanted to build her personality on that dichotomy.

Everyone would come to assume that Olivia Octavius’s scientific awakening came from some chance encounter with an octopus. But no. It had been a jellyfish she saw when she was six years old.

She was in a small aquarium in a land-locked city, nose and grubby fingers pressed to an enormous tank of water with sparse plant life at the bottom. Her wide eyes peered through the glass, looking for a shark—even though her mother had already told her there were no sharks in this aquarium. And then she saw it.

It was undulating and wispy, like gelatinous white lace. Insubstantial. Eerie and unknowable. Like the ghosts that showed up in the grey-and-gray polaroid pictures before they were developed enough for her to tell what she was looking at; like the colors that swirled in her eyes in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep and pressed her fingers to her eyelids; like the patterns made by snowflakes illuminated by headlights at night, or dust motes illuminated by sunbeams in the morning. It was like something from a different version of reality, a place she could nearly glimpse in dreams and from the corners of her eyes, but had never been able to call to her conscious mind until right now—now that it floated here, before her, suspended in the water. She held her breath, as though the slightest exhalation would scatter the specter’s particles.

She stared at it long after her family had moved on to the next room. She stared as her parents started calling, "Livvy? Livvy! Olivia, where are you?!" She stared at it over her shoulder as her father gripped her hand and pulled her into the next room. She stared, and stared, and stared back at it, her eyes wide and full of awe. She wanted to explain to them what she’d seen, what she’d felt, but she didn’t have the words. All she could do was try to call her family’s attention to it, and hope that the sight alone would awaken something in them as it had in her: "Look. _Look!_ "

That night, she dreamed of being that gelatinous and insubstantial, of having thousands of hands with millions of fingers, floating and transparent, stretching off into vast starry voids, forever reaching, reaching farther.

###

Over the phone, May was saying, "I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciate your coming to speak at Peter's school. I know you've got a full line up of private schools and colleges..."

"Anything for my favorite professor," Olivia said, balancing her phone between her shoulder and ear as she dangled a shrimp over the open octopus tank. The resident, Gus—Olivia's students called him Gus the 'Pus—reached up with two tentacles, wrapped one around the shrimp, and used the other to pat the back of Olivia's hand before sinking down with his lunch. She smiled at him and mouthed, _you're my favorite_ , before turning her attention back to her call. "But you'll owe me, though. When I manage to clone myself from a cut-off finger like a starfish, your nephew's got to go speak about science at _her_ elementary school."

May laughed. "What if he doesn't want to become a scientist?"

"May, he's going to hear _me_ talk. Once he does, he won't be able to imagine becoming anything _but_ a scientist.”

"Hah! Liv, he's _six_."

"Yeah, well, so was I when I got into marine biology. Now I've got two masters, I'm working on a dissertation on quantum physics, _and_ I'm doing student outreach programs for science and technology." Gus tried to wrap a couple of tentacles around Olivia's fingers where she'd left her hand resting on the opening of the octopus tank. She wiggled them to make the hunt harder.

"Hold on," May said, "you're still working on the dissertation? Right now? I thought you put it on hold while you were speaking at schools."

"Nope, I'm writing it in the evenings. Do you want to read it? I can send you the draft if you promise to check your email."

"Liv, I don't know where you find the energy for all your commitments."

"Oh, you know. Fueled by the wonder and mystery of the universe and all that." She took a sip from her fourth cup of coffee that day. Gus reached for it, and she held it over her head. "Hey, I've gotta go pack up a specimen to ship. Talk to you before the presentation, all right?"

When Olivia hung up, she carefully peeled Gus off her fingers, settled him into his tank, and stroked his head.

"You're heading down to Florida," she told him. "I'm so jealous. I've always wanted to go to Florida. See the ocean, check out the local specimens..." She sighed wistfully. "You're not going to get to see the ocean, though."

She fastened the lid on the tank.

Ten minutes later, a man from a genetics engineering lab that wouldn’t be found in any phone book handed her a wad of cash in exchange for the tank. Idly, he asked her how she was going to explain the missing octopus to the college.

She waved him off. “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ve already found an undergrad to frame. She’s a little bit klutzy, anyone in the department would believe she’d carelessly leave the lid loose on the tank and let him escape. You wouldn’t believe how often—”

He cut her off before she could explain about how octopuses were notorious for getting out of their tanks and sneaking around in labs and aquariums; she thought he would have been amused to hear about how they liked getting into other tanks and eating the other creatures, but oh well, his loss.

May was right about Olivia: she was indeed a busy little bee. Working on a dissertation in the field of quantum physics, doing outreach at schools, conducting independent research on prosthetic enhancement technology, _and_ acquiring her own funding for said research. That was Olivia, always a go-getter.

Gus was dead before the next weekend.

###

"So, tell me, Dr. Octavius—Should I call you that? Or Olivia?" The talk show host smiled even as she spoke, a smile that to Olivia looked plastic and vapid—the kind of smile celebrities perform for magazine covers but that are as glossy, flat, and thin as the paper they’re ultimately printed on.

Olivia, who was fine with being referred to by first name among her equals but who considered cue-card-reading talk show hosts barely the intellectual equals of a particularly dim goldfish, smiled back neutrally. "Dr. Octavius is fine."

"Dr. Octavius, I don't know how you do it! You're pushing science forward in— _how_ many different fields are you working in?"

"Three," she said. "Marine biology, prosthetic enhancements, and quantum physics."

" _Wow_.” Her mouth puckered, stretched into an O, and puckered again around the word, and Olivia was again struck with the mental image of a goldfish eating; the host’s eyes widened in feigned surprise didn’t help the impression. At the host’s performance of amazement, the audience clapped for Olivia as if on cue. Olivia smiled again, nodded to the audience in thanks. All part of her outreach role.

“And on top of that, you're regularly touring public schools to talk to kids about science, _and_ putting out TV special after TV special to explain the basics to the public. How do you find enough time in your life to do it all?"

"Well, you know how the phrase goes— _you make time for what you love_. And I love a lot of things."

The host laughed appreciatively. "It certainly seems like it. I don't know where you find the energy for all that—"

Olivia widened her eyes and silently mouthed, _lots of coffee_ , to the audience's amusement.

"—but I also don't know _why_. Some of your critics—I hope you don't mind my bringing them up?"

She shook her head, waving a hand dismissively. "They don't bother me."

"They've said that, with your amazing talents and mental super powers," (Olivia laughed at that) "you're doing a disservice to yourself and to humanity by turning _any_ of your time away from your inventions and discoveries in order to visit schools, or to appear on TV. Of course, _I'm_ happy to have you here—"

"I'm happy to _be_ here."

"—but, that's what they say."

Olivia sat back in her seat and lace her fingers. Part of proper outreach work was being approachable—smiling and laughing at the right points for the audience, wearing a proper palatable glossy magazine cover mask over the true depths of her passion—but she looked serious now. "You know, I'm glad you brought that up, because this is something near and dear to my heart. I consider the outreach, the documentaries, as important a part of my job as my research. I mean, talk about giving back to humanity—what would I be giving humanity if I kept everything I've learned to myself? There's so much _wonder_ in the universe—" she gestured around them now, at the lights, the audience, the studio set, "everywhere you look." While her voice was calm and her posture relaxed, something wild and awed and fascinated glittered in her eyes. "The universe is a—an utterly magnificent place, full of mysteries. From its building blocks, to the complex creatures it constructs, to the beautiful ruins it leaves behind when it breaks down to its fundamental level. I don't _just_ want to understand it for myself—I need to show it to everyone else, too, to let _everyone_ understand and see the universe’s infinite, wondrous possibilities."

"Wow," the host said, conclusively, although Olivia could have gone on. "That's great, that's really wonderful. And that's what you're here to do today, right? Show us some of the wonders of the universe?"

Olivia nodded. "I certainly am." And waited while several fish tanks were wheeled on stage.

###

Years later, when the talk show host-turned-essayist wrote about meeting Dr. Olivia "Doc Ock" Octavius, she said that while she truly believed that Olivia meant everything she'd said about wanting to share wonder with humanity, she'd also gotten the haunting feeling that she cared about _humanity_ more than she cared about _humans_. There was curiosity when she looked at people, but coldness too, as if she were sizing them up to see if they'd make interesting experiments—as if, in the grand architecture of her miraculous universe, they were just beautiful statues standing in the hall.

###

She liked working with yarn. She liked the way it curled and coiled around her fingertips. She liked the way it turned from one dimensional to two just by entangling it with itself. But today the yarn looked limp and lifeless next to the new artificial limbs manipulating it.

Three dozen of her students watched with rapt fascination. Two tentacles bounced a ball of yarn back and forth, while two more deftly knitted it into a scarf. When the prototype arm augmentations completed a six inch by six inch square, she beamed at her students: "Test one, manual dexterity and independent motion: passed."

The students cheered.

She continued knitting, but her eyes weren't on the yarn or the scarf; they were on her new arms.

###

"I don't get what the problem is," the grad student whispered, clutching the prototype arm augmentations to his chest and leaning his weight into Olivia's desk. His nose was crooked; Olivia's glasses were askew and her lip split, both legs hurt, and something was wrong with her left arm. They were both breathing heavily. Olivia hadn't gotten violent since a handful of playground brawls in elementary school that ended when her mom said children who fight don’t get to work in aquariums. Distantly, she almost thought that she'd enjoy this, enjoy the violence, if it wasn't for the fact that he'd pinned her to the wall with her own desk. "We'll split the funding we get from Oscorp, just like everything else we've sold them. Hell, I'll give you sixty percent—they're paying us so much it doesn't matter."

"It _does_ matter," she cried hoarsely. "They're _mine_ , they're _my_ arms! I won't give them up!"

"Then I'll _keep_ Oscorp's money," the grad student said. Olivia snarled at him. Without thinking, she struck across the desk. Her right hand curled around the arm augmentations, fingertips feeling for the controls as he tried to jerk back.

The arms powered up, and reacted to their master's commands.

Test two, strength and crushing power: passed.

When she pushed the desk back, the arms obediently wrapped around her waist and latched in place, just like they were supposed to, and delicately took off her broken glasses to wipe the grad student's blood off the lenses. The arms waved around her in a blur: insubstantial, gelatinous, and eerie.

The arms put her glasses back on. There was a faceless red-and-blue man perched in her window.

"You're too late to save him," she said, nodding at the grad student. "But not too late to save yourself." For the first time, she lifted herself up on her augmented arms. She felt weightless, like floating in the ocean. "I suggest you run."

Test three, speed and reflexes.

###

"So what happened after you told him that you wouldn't help him sell university property to Oscorp?"

"Well, then, he—he put on the arms himself. To try to escape, I suppose."

"And that's when they went berserk?"

"Exactly. The arms were only calibrated to process my brain signals, and I'd been practicing with them a long time—without calibrating to him, they must have seemed like gibberish. So they interpreted the signals the best way they could—"

"And, mangled him?"

"More or less, yes."

"So, all the damage shown in these pictures—that was the arms? Entirely by accident?"

"Yes, they sort of—flailed around, and then curled in around him, like they were tying a knot with him in the middle. They stopped when they broke his spine."

"And the connection to his brain was severed?"

"Correct."

"And, the injuries you got...?"

"All obtained while trying to pull him free of the arms."

"You must have known that the arms were far too strong to just beat back."

"I did, yes. I—I panicked. He'd taken three of my classes and I saw so much potential in him, I couldn't stand the thought of doing nothing and watching one of my students die."

"I think any professor would understand. What about the scratches, on your face? The ones that the prosecution thinks look like defensive wounds?"

"It was so fast, but I think he must have caught my face by accident with one of his hands. He was—oh, it was awful—he was flailing too, while the arms broke him apart. I'm sure he didn't mean to."

"What did you do once his back was broken and he'd gone limp?"

"I got the arms off. I was worried that the nerve endings in his spine might line up or something and the arms would react to whatever neurons were still firing in his brain."

"And then what?"

"I called 911."

"No further questions."

###

She'd been placed on sabbatical during the trial; so to keep herself sufficiently busy, she took up kickboxing.

She liked it.

###

The prosecuting attorney threw down a letter purporting to be a signed testimony from Spider-Man himself, claiming he'd witnessed the incident. But Spider-Man himself never showed up to crawl into the witness box (probably thanks to those broken bones Olivia had left him with). The letter was quickly declared a hoax and the prosecuting team was turned into a joke.

She was found innocent.

Even so, the university regretfully let her go, due to the questionable lab safety and overhasty rush to testing that had resulted in the accident. She lost her job, and her arms. And a friend. For some reason, although everyone else at the university accepted Dr. Octavius’s innocence and stood by her side, May Parker had stopped taking her calls.

But that was fine. Outside of the heat of the fistfight with her grad student, she'd found some perspective; she didn't need the arms. The arms the university had kept were only the prototype. She was working on the next model in her own garage.

And everyone was lining up to hire her.

###

Much later, she figured out why May had stopped talking to her.

So that was where he'd gotten all his fantastic gadgets.

###

A truck hit her.

And she tumbled backward into the beam of shapes-colors-lights.

As she stretched out her hands, her hair, her tentacles, she saw them repeated and repeated then repeated again, like mirrors on the inside of a box. Infinitely, pulled into every direction. She stretched but she didn't tear, like yarn being unknit. She wasn't dividing, she was multiplying. She'd always dreamed of touching the infinite. She'd never thought it could be so literal. Stretching out across all of reality, limb after limb after limb, repeated and repeated then repeated again.

She wished she could show this to everyone.

**Author's Note:**

> Post for this fic also available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/613695092087308288/jellyfish). Comments/reblogs there are highly appreciated (as are comments here)!


End file.
